IP: -- DNS antitrust lawsuit extended to NSF, free speech

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 13:12:36 -0400
From: Sharon Eisner Gillett <sharoneg () victory-research com>
To: David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: FYI -- DNS antitrust lawsuit extended to NSF, free speech


David,


At the risk of bringing up a topic that many people feel no longer
belongs in polite company, farcast (thanks for telling me about them)
just brought me news of an interesting DNS legal action announced
yesterday (the full press release is at
http://name.space/ns./pr.9-18-97.html).  The gist of it is that pgMedia,
Inc. (which operates the name.space registry), which was already suing
NSI on anti-trust/essential facility grounds to open up the root zone
files to sharing, has now added the National Science Foundation as a
defendant.  NSF is said to be preventing NSI from allowing the TLD space
to be expanded, and therefore impinging on freedom of expression.  The
original complaint is available on the name.space Web site, and I'm
guessing the amended complaint will be added soon.


It is probably a coincidence that this action comes shortly after the
gTLD folks issued an RFC which, among other things, asks for opinions on
whether domain names should be used as content tags to create "red light
zones" on the net...see http://www.gtld-mou.org/docs/notice-97-02.html
for that RFC.


The anti-trust angle is interesting...there have been multiple
proposals/attempts at registries competing with InterNIC, but none of
them can get past the problem that most users aren't connected to
systems that can resolve the additional names, and aren't strongly
motivated enough to change their pointers (or their ISP's pointers). 
The idea of this suit is to make it so users could see more names
without having to change their pointers -- going right to the crux of
the problem.  The judge certainly has his work cut out for him...


Feel free to forward to IP if you deem appropriate.


Regards,
Sharon Gillett
sharoneg () victory-research com
Research Affiliate, MIT Sloan School of Management